Here’s a scenario: You’re redesigning a site – maybe it’s yours or your client’s site – and you’re concerned about how the redesign is going to affect your current SEO state. The redesign is anticipated to launch about 6 months to a year. You decide that, to make things easier for your “redesign,” and for fear of becoming a victim of another Panda update, you hold off on all of your SEO optimization until the redesign is done. Which means no content updates and no on-page or off-page optimization, among other SEO campaigns you’re running on the site. And to make it fair in your mind, you plan on saving or cataloging your content so that you can maintain that “ranking content” when your site goes live. Sounds like a plan, right?

As the words of one of the greatest rappers of all time, LL Cool J, plainly put it: “I don’t think so.” And here are reasons why it’s a bad idea to postpone your SEO:

Content is STILL King

Your content still matters to your audience, and by that measure alone should be reasons why you cannot stop your SEO. You need to be able to continually revise your content to increase your exposure and engage/re-engage your audience into your site. If halting your SEO campaigns for a period of time is your choice of measure, you’re not updating your site with fresh, relevant and usable content for your audience. Think about the long-term snowball effect this has on your content production: stale content over a fixed long-term range can damage your content appeal to your users, which will force users to look elsewhere for what they need to find. When users look elsewhere for the content they need, search engines won’t see your site and your content as relevant and useful to the users looking for it. This will force your content to be perceived as little value by search engines, primarily Google, and thus your page ranks and perceived value will decline.

Metrics? We Don’t Need No Stinking Metrics?

That’s exactly what is going to happen when your SEO is postponed: your metrics will be shot. I can’t say for every site that your traffic, page views, conversions, etc. will fall dramatically, nor do I guarantee that at all. However, I do know that you will experience a drop or dip in some way, shape or form on your site. How dramatic of a drop will depend on how long the redesign will take, how big of a redesign your site will span, and the number of pages will be affected.

It should be noted that your metrics and analytic reports should be part of the equation when planning on redesigning while postponing your SEO. If metrics are not part of the marketing strategy behind this redesign, then I suggest educating your managers, directors, and/or executives on the potential issues that will show up on your reports. Make them aware of what will happen before and after the work stoppage and how much work it will take to get back into the search game.

Bye, Bye, Bye (Rankings)

Google has stated that they take into consideration user interaction and engagement towards your content in its algorithm to determine site rank, weight, and overall value. If your users don’t see your site to be relevant in the time that you do the redesign, search engines will take note of that and use it against you. By not changing and refreshing your content over that period of time, you’re providing your users with more useless, irrelevant information that, in this “give it to me now” day and age, will be seen as “so 10 minutes ago.” Not engaging your users with relevant, up-to-date information, you’re more than likely going to lose your rankings and your search exposure due to stale, unchanging and boring content.

Redesigns And SEO Can Co-Exist, But Only If Your Managers Know How

I know this for a fact that redesigns and SEO can work together and in unison. I have done it as a Senior SEO Specialist for a marketing agency, working with content developers, designers and developers, and IT to create redesigns, newer/fresher content, along with revamped on-page and off-page optimization. It’s not too difficult to do in most respects, but the knowledge and best practices of managing your redesign and SEO should be passed on from the top down. Think about it: If you’re an SEO expert in your company, and you’re told to stop your SEO campaigns/optimization because of a redesign, and the reasons given to you are a load of crap by industry standards, then it looks like the managers, directors, or C-level executives responsible do not know the massive implications of this tactic.

You’re Not Using Technical Assistance That Can Help Your SEO

Are your managers and directors not helping you argue and protect your SEO investments? Your managers are probably afraid that by doing the redesign, they’re going to screw up any optimization (and results from those optimization campaigns) already done throughout the site, such as keyword-rich URLs, title and description tags, landing pages, etc. If that’s the case, let your IT team help out with 301 and 302 redirects during and after the redesign. This will help your site get positioned to visibility while your managing the redesign and the work after that has transpired. Moreover, sitemap submissions conducted on a regular basis will keep spiders up-to-date on what’s hot and what’s not on your site, including relevant temporary or permanent redirects that can push your older contents aside for fresher meat.

Social Media Won’t Be Enough To Replace Your Search Position

If you think that pure social media alone will help you offset your SEO, think again. Do you really think that tweeting and posting content on your social platforms pointing to your outdated site is going to make your site have a stronger relevancy on your searches? Do you really expect to push old and stale content to your users who are looking to the here and now? Social media needs updated content just as much as SEO does, and the integration of two will create more firepower for your brand online. So why screw your SEO campaigns over?

You’re Screwing The SEO Work Previously Done To Get You Where You Are

By conducting SEO stoppage on your site, you’re basically screwing the work that was previously done to get where you are on a search visibility scale. If you’re the marketing genius who wanted to stop the site from being optimized while you’re redesigning, do you really think that picking it up again later on (whether it’s 6 months, 1 year or worse) will put you back in the map automatically?

If you’re the SEO person, content writer, or SEO team involved (or chosen to NOT be involved) in this predicament, are you already conducting a short-term and long-term strategy to help decrease the time that you’ll be gone from your user’s search? If not, I believe that you and/or your team should have a back-up plan, and plan it well.

You’re Screwing Your SEO Foundation, Then Starting From Scratch

SEO is the grounds that hold the foundation of your online marketing. Halting and restarting your SEO campaign is like taking out the foundation of your existing house, and then re-building the foundation under the weight of the existing house. It’s going to take a lot more effort from an SEO perspective to get back the ranking and relevancy you would lose if you were to continue to halt your campaigns. Imagine the amount of work that your content marketers, SEO specialists and other online marketers will have to do to ramp up back to the relevancy that you probably enjoy now. Now, imagine the time it will take for that work to actually produce fruit for your site.

My Conclusion

If it was up to me, I would not halt any SEO work during a redesign at all. Not now, and not ever. If you’re not too concerned about SEO like some companies I know of, then this is up to you to conduct and likely at your own risk. However, if you are concerned about your overall visibility and you’re conducting the halt anyway, then I suggest  conducting a vast project management and risk assessment before proceeding with your redesign project. Having a solid SEO strategy for your website is great for long-term benefits, but these long-term benefits depend on your short-term work. If your short-term work involves no SEO whatsoever, then your long-term SEO strategies are useless, like microphones given to Milli Vanilli.

I JUST had a conversation with a print marketing writer about her job and responsibilities, and of course, how she’s faring up with writing for content online.  She gave me the “what’s the difference” speech, so of course, I had to bust out my teacher hat and give her the scoop.  Of course there are differences in print and online content, and while there are many that can be considered, there are a few that I believe are very important to consider:

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I was speaking to a SEO newbie recently on establishing a solid foundation on SEO/SEM, and included in this discussion was how to view search engines from a marketing perspective rather than a consumer perspective.  I do admit, he had some great questions to ask, and was very inquisitive on question upon question.  I enjoy those kinds of discussions, especially when it makes me sharpen my foundation as well.  With their permission, I am able to share a few keynotes on this discussion.

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I am sure that there are various ways of creating optimized content for site development, but I hardly think that a lot of them result in positive ROI given by the “click here” verbiage, lack of quality search terms, and untargeted search phrases that are predominant in most sites and advertisements I have seen.  Below you’ll find a method I use that really helped me in differentiating keyword weights and defining a targeted search engine marketing infrastructure.  I wrote a response to an SEO question in my LinkedIn account that is similar to what I am writing here, and basically outIines a more complete basic SEO guide.  I hope that this tutorial will help ease the content development process for you.

For the purpose of this tutorial, the business in question is an independent record label named Rawk Fist, and its summary is as follows:

1) Rawk Fist is a new record label with a new web site and a budding following.
2) Rawk Fist is looking into conducting mostly guerrilla marketing tactics and online marketing initiatives to offset their modest marketing budget.
3) Rawk Fist’s artist base and target market are mostly unsigned bands, musicians and artists that are predominantly online but also offline-based.

RESEARCH KEYWORDS AND KEY PHRASES

Google Keyword Tool and SEOBook Keyword Tool

1) Have a list of keywords to research. The first thing to do is to determine the best possible key phrases that will produce better ROI and search engine exposure for Rawk Fist.  I suggest writing down words and phrases that you want to include or want to research and keep notes on them.  Some of the notes I usually take down are the search volume data for each keyword and/or key phrase, the average volume, competitor use, and so forth.

2) Use Google’s Keyword tool or SEOBook’s Keyword tool. There are a few free tools that I like using to find key words and phrases that have great search engine weight:  Google Keyword Tool and SEOBook’s Keyword tool are 2 I will focus on for this tutorial.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Using Google’s Adwords Keyword tool, typing in “record label” will net these results [See images to the right].  I have recorded the metrics for both October and November. For both metrics, notice that the advertiser competition for this search term results in a very high amount for a broad generic “record label” term, generating over 90,000 search queries (more if plural), and averaging between 110,000 to 160,000 search queries throughout a 12-month period. That’s a lot for a monthly search query, especially if the goal is for Rawk Fist to reach the 1st page and/or top 3 search positions.

What this means is that there are WAY too many people searching for that “record label” phrase at any given month.  Moreover, it will take a lot of effort to even compete in generating a positive ranking for that phrase due to the high volume.  Generating positive ranking (or in other words, positive return on investment, or ROI) requires a lesser search volume and average search volume to: 1) increase chances of the company and search terms being searched, 2) increase chances of search terms being positioned and company being ranked, which leads to 3) an increase in branding power, search quality and integrity (how Google defines and values your company and your value as a search entity), deliverability, and prolonged search exposure that leads to direct (and indirect) business revenue growth.

3) Target your keywords. In order to gain better ranking positions in search engines, the search phrase “record label” needs to be more targeted. Targeting keywords and phrases results in a smaller, more refined search volume which gives your keywords a better search positioning. While it is ok to include the generic keywords to your site, it is more important to include targeted keywords and phrases, as these will be the driving force of your organic search results.  In this case, the phrases “independent record label,” “independent record labels,” “music record label” and “indie record label” are more likely to generate a more positive return because of the level of search frequency.  You will also note that the advertiser competition box for each keyword and phrase show different levels of advertiser activity.  The differences in levels will be need to be addressed when you’re trying to find keywords that fit for your company.  In this case, while the advertiser competition is high on some of Rawk Fist’s potential phrases, it shouldn’t be a deterrent to  choosing that keyword nonetheless.  Using it will help expand into other territories and give other businesses a run for their money.

The keywords and phrases to start off are as follows: record label (s), independent record label (s), music record label (s), and indie record label (s).

Outside of “record label” and “independent record label,” Rawk Fist wants to be more diverse in its genre and musical audience.  There will be a need for musical genres to be infused in the keywords and phrases for Rawk Fist.  Examples include “hip hop record label,” “rock record label,” “pop rock record label,” and “funk record label.”  Going back to the Google keyword tool, add the words “hip hop,” “funk,” “rap,” “rock,” and other genres you want to put in the mix and press enter to see the results.  To show you a more detailed example of a genre, let’s focus on the word “hip hop.”

Google Keyword Search

The phrase “hip hop record label” shows a high advertiser competition rate, with a search volume of 1300 search volume for the month of November and average search volume of 1000 for a 12-month period.  Its plural version (“hip hop record labels”) show double the monthly search volume and at least double the average search volume.  The results of both term’s search volume show a great starting point for building organic search engine credentials and integrity from the ground up.  Why?  Because there is enough search volume to warrant the work to conduct optimization without drowning in heavy search volume, and at the same time, having enough volume to climb up the search positioning and ranking with the keywords being searched on.

4) Expand on your targeted list. Now that we have established the keywords further, we can add hip hop record label (s) to the mix.  To research other genres, keep adding phrases and words on the Google keyword tool to find positive results in mid-size search volume and average search volume.  To include more targeted versions of these keywords, add other market audience parameters of choice, such as city, state, geographic location, more defined genres, etc.  Some examples can include: los angeles underground hip hop record label, seattle grunge rock record label, new york indie hip hop record label, etc.  Adding mixtures such as the examples I mentioned will create more refined and funneled search structures for your marketing initiatives.

That’s it for this tutorial.  Are you exhausted yet??  The next few tutorials will be built on this keyword tutorial, focusing on creating meta codes such as titles, keywords, and descriptions, naming convention infrastructures, and diving into more detail on content development, with examples of proper image optimization, in-text linkings and more!

Stay tuned!

Google recently launched its search engine starter guide within the past couple of weeks, and after reading it (and re-reading it), I was reminded of my earlier post on why some companies have difficulty getting ranked in search engines (see “Why Can’t I Get Ranked In Search Engines??“).  Reiterating and reconfirming what my colleague John Ellis had to say about his review, I was glad that they were able to provide a standard guide for basic SEO work.  Even if it’s just basic, it provides a refresher course for those that are in deep in the world of SEM, but at the same time makes for a great foundation for newbies.

For those new to the SEO/SEM world, PLEASE (I implore you!!!) to read this and apply it to your end of the industry.

2 things that I read that made me ponder a moment or two on how people do SEO: 1) how they come up with their search phrases and keywords, and 2) how they come up with the naming URL infrastructure of their site.  It really amazes me to see how many people want to rank at the top of search engines and use plain, non-targeted words or phrases that lack search weight and search frequency.  If you, for argument’s sake, run a restaurant and want your restaurant to rank on the first page of Google, you don’t want to just use the word “restaurant” to get search engine exposure.  That’s like using “person” as the search word for trying to look your name up on Google.  Try that sometime and see how the results fare on searching your name.

Next is dealing with the URL naming convention.  It’s usually developers that do not know anything about SEO/SEM, but I won’t hold it against them.  At my work, naming conventions are out of whack when it comes to optimization, because naming conventions weren’t a part of the whole online marketing infrastructure.  There needs to be a cohesive balance, foundation, and best practices in all aspects of site development, but it is not necessarily common for marketers to have all of those in tact.  Say, for another argument’s sake, you have a travel agency site and you want to build traffic for a special microsite or page on visiting Ireland.  The person who is developing your site ends up with the index page title of visitIRL.php, and each corresponding subpage on that particular visiting Ireland site is visitIRLpage1.php, visitIRLpage2.php, etc.  Will your subpage rank high on Google when a user is searching for the cost of visiting Ireland on your page and your page name is visitIRLpage[insert page number here].php?  Or do you think they will see your page higher on Google with the URL name of visiting-ireland-cost.php (or some other variation of that)?

I’m sure it may be easy for some, but for those who are still confused, do not fret.  My next blog is about creating a step-by-step tutorial on how to find quality keywords and phrases to generate more quality traffic for your site.

Stay tuned!

After searching for articles on organic rankings, I found an old panel discussion that SEOmoz.org had the privilege of holding with highly sought-after SEO experts and contributors to conduct research on search engine rankings and optimization; with the likes of Aaron Wall from SEOBook, Joost de Valk from Yoalk, and Danny Sullivan from SearchEngineLand saying a few words.  The result is a compilation of their wisdom and knowledge about SEM rankings, and a bonus gift of specific Google ranking trends.  Here are some of the results of that panel discussion, which you can also find at www.seomoz.org.

Positive Factors:

1. Keyword use in Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
3. Global Link Popularity of Site
4. Age of Site
5. Link Popularity within Site’s Link Infrastructure

Negative Factors:

1. Server is often inaccessible
2. Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
3. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
4. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
5. Overuse of Targeted Keywords (Stuffing/Spamming)

I’m really glad that they were able to discuss questions and concerns about the methods and means that search engines render ranking procedures and ranking elements.  It would have been a great experience as an overall online marketer to really get to see these guys in person and pick some of their brains.  But I guess SEOmoz beat me to it!  There is literally so much to think about that came out of this discussions that I have still yet to really dive in deeply into these results, since I think a lot of the comments made I had to really assess and analyze for practicality in the most recent timeframe.  I figured since this was last year’s panel that some of the methods may have changed.  After all, technology does run faster than the speed of light.  However, I thought it would be at least educational, if not nostalgic, to post the results and educate (and in some cases re-educate) my fellow colleagues and potential clients about ways to enhance your online marketing efforts.  Once I get my hand and brain in depth with this, I will return to do more!

Until then, sleep tight, all you SEO-ers.

In the past 3 weeks, I have had several clients come up to me asking several variances of a very universal question:  “My web site is not ranking in search engines, and I am having trouble generating positive traffic in my site.  How can you help my business fix that?”  And after a deeper look into their respective situations, I realized several missing key factors that would have generated better ROI for them if these were placed before the site build.  It’s interesting because a great portion of these are really “basic” things (and I use that term loosely), or at least they should have been basic.

Basic Fundamentals

Some basic on-site fundamentals for ranking higher in search engines:

• Content Development

  First and foremost, I feel the need to define what the “content” means in layman’s terms. “Content development” is 1) the research, development and implementation of text (paragraphs, verbiage, keywords, phrases, and headers, to name a few) on your site; and 2) the placement of text-based and graphic-based marketing elements such as register buttons and links, in-page text links, and so forth. While some can argue that there are more to content development than what I have suggested, I’ll keep this definition to a minimum, for argument’s sake :)

  “What does my site’s content have to do with getting ranked,” they ask?  The answer: it has a lot to do with the rankings. The content’s relevancy to the subject matter and the words used on search engines have a surprising factor in determining the value of your site when searched online. If specific keywords being searched online are not found anywhere in your site — within the code or text — then the likelihood of the site being ranked to the targeted keywords is as great as country music surviving in Seattle… unless there are signs of black hatting that is giving them great rankings without being relevant.

  Furthermore, the content should be able to have rich keywords within call-to-action elements that are targeted and visibly accessible to the user and to spiders/robots. Granted that the content should have targeted keywords and phrases anyway, it’s amazing to see that a lot of the web sites out there still do not have that luxury. One of the reasons I believe that these web sites lack such content is because they were written by someone who lacks online marketing knowledge and online content development. While traditional marketing and online marketing share similar theories and foundation, practicality and execution of these theories are handled very differently. Search engine marketing, both organic and pay-per-click, play a vital role in how marketing is conducted online. Case in point: a potential client that I am trying to help right now is having issues with his lack of rankings online. I found out that he wrote the content himself with limited knowledge of how to generate exposure, traffic and revenue online, which evidently has resulted in lack of positive site performance and business revenue. His search engine rankings are dismal, and he’s wondering why he’s not getting any bites on his hook.

• Design

  In today’s online culture, I have seen a lot of sites with purely great designs and effective usability. And, after spending some time in those sites, I found that these sites had one thing in common: they JUST looked pretty. Some web designers are just that — designers who, unfortunately, have no knowledge of the fact that web design can now be considered under the online marketing umbrella. While they are rightly to be just web designers, they should also have basic fundamentals on search engine optimization and online marketing techniques to help market their site effectively, not just design them. Similar to keyword text and phrase placements, design elements should be structured around marketing fundamentals based on the site’s online business strategy and strategic marketing efforts. A design element whose specific purpose is to create call-to-action should be visibly placed and, when placed with text, should be relevant to that specific text that it is tied to. When multiple design elements are needed to create call-to-action from its users, a hierarchy and/or priority should be enforced and implemented based on strategic marketing initiatives.

• Meta Tags

  While meta tags do not impact search rankings the way that they’re used to, it would still be feasible to implement tags on your code as part of an overall site development and online marketing best practices. Results of keywords and keyword phrases research should dictate your content development but also your meta tag development. The reason being is that you want to have as much ammunition in getting ranked as possible. Pretend viewing your site as a meat lovers or ultimate pizza, and meta tags are one of the toppings to make your pizza.

• Images

  As an online marketing best practice, images should be relevant to the contents of the site, containing tags and descriptions derived from the keyword and keyword phrase research.  Image placement should be conducted in the same manner as call-to-action elements are placed in design.

Other Methods

Search engines rank pages differently from each other, and to illustrate this matter more effectively, I will use Aaron Wall, author and owner of SEOBook.com and his research on the differences between search engines.

The Short Versions

• Yahoo!

  • been in the search game for many years.
  • is better than MSN but nowhere near as good as Google at determining if a link is a natural citation or not.
  • has a ton of internal content and a paid inclusion program. both of which give them incentive to bias search results toward commercial results
  • things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in Yahoo!

• MSN Search

  • new to the search game
  • is bad at determining if a link is natural or artificial in nature
  • due to sucking at link analysis they place too much weight on the page content
  • their poor relevancy algorithms cause a heavy bias toward commercial results
  • likes bursty recent links
  • new sites that are generally untrusted in other systems can rank quickly in MSN Search
  • things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in MSN Search

• Google

  • has been in the search game a long time, and saw the web graph when it is much cleaner than the current web graph
  • is much better than the other engines at determining if a link is a true editorial citation or an artificial link
  • looks for natural link growth over time
  • heavily biases search results toward informational resources
  • trusts old sites way too much
  • a page on a site or subdomain of a site with significant age or link related trust can rank much better than it should, even with no external citations
  • they have aggressive duplicate content filters that filter out many pages with similar content
  • if a page is obviously focused on a term they may filter the document out for that term. on page variation and link anchor text variation are important. a page with a single reference or a few references of a modifier will frequently outrank pages that are heavily focused on a search phrase containing that modifier
  • crawl depth determined not only by link quantity, but also link quality. Excessive low quality links may make your site less likely to be crawled deep or even included in the index.
  • things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links are generally ineffective in Google when you consider the associated opportunity cost

• Ask.com

  • looks at topical communities
  • due to their heavy emphasis on topical communities they are slow to rank sites until they are heavily cited from within their topical community
  • due to their limited market share they probably are not worth paying much attention to unless you are in a vertical where they have a strong brand that drives significant search traffic

Aaron’s explanation of search engine ranking and search engine relevancy will highlight certain aspects and factors behind your site’s lack of performance, and hopefully will educate those in charge of strategic online marketing initiatives for the site(s) in question.